American Novels

"That was no town for the aged or the aging. There was love behind the curtains and love behind the doors. Love in the squares and circles and love along the curbs. / Particularly along those curbs west of the Southern Railway Station. Where every window framed some love bird lamed in flight. Where every screen door was a cage. What had been Storyville was now an aviary. / [...] / From wheatland and tenement, hotel and harbor, girls and women of a hundred feathers had come to nest both sides of South Basin. Girls downy as chicks who have just lost their mammas and chorus-line dolls who had long lost their down. Girls who came scolding like winter jays, ruffing their tail feathers and ready for battle. But some like little wrens of summer, seeking hollows to hide in forever. / [...] / Birds of a hundred varied feathers, hooters, hissers, howlers, quackers – it was a new kind of zoo wherein the captured foraged for themselves."

"‘When you start hitting toward sixty,’ Gross complained, ‘you feel some days like you want to take a cab to the graveyard and wait for your maker beside your stone. Yet when you've not had an hour's true contentment out of all those sixty years, you don't want to lay down till you've had your hour. You want something for all your pain.’"

"Good girls and bad carried on so much alike, in the cheery old summer of 1931, a Yankee might well have been deceived. / The Southern boy was a bit harder to fool. The moment he saw a girl behind a door screen naked to her navel and lifting her breasts, he sensed something was up. When she did a slow spread-legged grind and threw in a blinding bump for good measure, he suspected it wasn't free. When she opened the door and said, ‘Step in, I don't bite,’ he went in, of course, out of simple courtesy. But he wasn't fooled: she was after his money, that was all. No, it wasn't easy to fool a Southern boy any summer."

"‘I never heard of a pimp being elected mayor nor even of one who bothered to vote, so why blame them for the way things are? They weren't the ones who made the laws that let the trade go on. If nobody wanted there to be pimps, honey, there wouldn't be no pimps. Isn't it strange that it's the very ones who say we're a public disgrace who pay us best? You know yourself that it's the ones from the Department who come down early on Saturdays to holler, “Bring us two women and a bottle!” ’ / ‘What's wrong about two women and a bottle?’ Hallie asked, just to find out. / ‘Honey, there's nothing wrong with two women and a bottle, or three or four women and a whole case, so long as you don't sneak it and preach against it the next day.’"

"In the cheery old summer of '31 some states were dry and some states were wet. [...] / The Ladder of Success had been inverted, the top was the bottom, and the bottom was the top. Leaders of men still sporting gold watches were lugging baby photographs door to door with their soles flapping. Physicians were out selling skin lighteners and ship captains queued in hope of a cabin boy's mop and pail. / Offices of great fire insurance companies went up in smoke, which seemed no more than just. When the fire department – long unpaid – cleared off, little remained but scorched files, swivel-chairs on which no one would ever swivel again, lovely heaps of frosted glass, and all that mahogany. / All that mahogany that hadn't helped anybody but brokers after all. Then the brokers began jumping off rooftops with no greater consideration for those passing below than they'd had when their luck was running. Emperors of industry snatched all the loose cash on which they could lay hand and made one fast last run. Lawyers sued one another just to keep in practice."

"When his eyes had got used to the deep-sea light he discerned a Negro the size of Carnera, naked to the waist and shining with iron-colored sweat, decapitating snapping turtles with silvered precision. / Now the trouble with turtles is that they believe all things come to him who will but struggle. There's always room at the top for one more, they think. And in this strange faith the snapping kind is of all the most devout. For it's precisely that that makes them the snapping kind. Though the way be steep and bloody, that doesn't matter so long as you reach the top of the bleeding heap. / [...] / Dove didn't hesitate. ‘I'll take the tarpon soup.’ / He didn't yet know that there was also room for one more at the bottom."

"He came to an intersection where one road led to town and the other away. The town road was festooned, street lamp to street lamp, with welcoming pennants; it was wide and newly paved. The other was lampless and pennantless and plainly led nowhere at all. Without hesitation Dove chose the nowhere road. For that was the only place, in his heart of hearts, that he really wanted to go."

"When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only one way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don't have enough. If everybody has more than enough, what good is my more-than-enough? What good is a wide meadow open to everyone? It isn't until others are fenced out that the open pasture begins to have real value. What good is being a major if you can't have more than a second lieutenant? What good is a second lieutenant for that matter?"

"It was night bright as day, it was day dark as night, but stuffed shirts and do-righties owned those shows. / For a Do-Right Daddy is right fond of money and still he don't hate fun. He charged the girls double for joint-togs and drinks, rent, fines, towel service and such. But before any night's ball was done, he joined in the fun. / Later he had to be purged of guilt so he could sleep with his wife again. That was where the pulpit came in. There had to be something official like that to put the onus on the women. The preachers, reformers, priests and such did this work well. Some girls were just naturally bad, they explained. Others were made bad by bad men. In no case was it ever the fault of anyone who profited by the shows. Daddy, you can go home again."

"‘Dear friends and gentle hearts,’ [the King of the Turtles] wigwagged, feeling the final cold creep up – ‘Will you stand by to leave your old friend die? I wanted nothing for myself – money, comfort, power, security – I worked for these only because those dear to me wanted them. (Of course, as long as they were handy I shared them from time to time.) Would you really leave me here to die? / True, I ate well. But that was only to keep up my strength for the sacrificial ordeal of my days. For I never knowingly harmed a fellow creature unless he got in my way. I never took unfair advantage unless it profited me. Can you really leave so lovely a turtle to die? / A devoted father, a loyal citizen, a faithful employee, a kind employer, a considerate neighbor, a regular church-goer. Out of purity of heart I respected the laws of God and man. Purity, and fear of jail. Could you really stand by and watch so saintly a turtle die? / I seemed a bit intent a moment ago, you say, on grinding my brothers' necks to gristle? I confess – but that was a moment ago, and now I've changed my ways. Could you bear to see such an open-minded turtle die?’"

"‘My line of work, as you may have guessed, Tex, is women. Do you know anything about them?’ / ‘I know that if God made anything better I aint come across it yet, but that's as far as my knowledge goes.’"

"That nothing could lower human dignity faster than manual labor was understood. ‘Go get yourself a lunch bucket and get back in your ditch’ was the ultimate insult on Perdido Street."

"The whole town was in drydock, the whole country in hock, but the pit of the Depression, a secretary of labor announced, was past at last. The President's stand on wages had averted an even worse slump, the secretary added, ‘Business is starting back.’ / ‘Nobody goes hungry,’ said Little Round Hoover, wiping chicken gravy off his little round chin. A man with the right stuff in him didn't need government help to find work. That would make him lazy. He might even get sick. Self-reliance for the penniless and government help to the rich, the Old Guard was in again. Hoover patted the chicken inside his own pot. ‘I got it made,’ said Little Round Hoover. / And in all those miles of wharves and docks the one boat still shipping water was a freighter under an Argentine flag and the proud Spanish title of Shichi-Fukujin."

"All he recalled clearly was opening the door the next morning and seeing a veil of mist so blue it blurred the outlines of house, hill and tree. And as the morning warmed the whole big blue world began to smoke faintly. / Louisiana. / In the long afternoon the clouds stacked. And still, over it all, that pale shifting veil. / A real southland haze in which one sees whatever one wishes to see. A haze that seeps behind the eyes and makes a wish-dream of everything."

"‘Mister, I'll cook, I'll cuss, I'll mend yer socks, I'll stoke yer engines 'r catch you a damn whale barehand. [...]’ / ‘You do know that there is a seafaring man's union?’ He gave Dove the benefit of a serious doubt. / ‘Mister, I'm a Christian boy and don't truckle to Yankee notions. Put my name in your ship's dinner-pot and you're my captain, I'm your hand. Just tell me ever-what you want done and I'll 'tend it, for I'm bedcord strong. If I don't turn you out what in your eyes makes a fair day's work you can put me off at the first port of call. Aint that fair enough?’ / ‘Mighty fair, son. If more boys were willing to work for nothing there'd be just that many more millionaires.’"

"‘The poorer people are the more likely they are to help you,’ Kitty told him the next morning after they had once again left engine and cars in charge of the crew. ‘Pick the first unpainted shack you see.’ / She followed Dove into a littered yard and waited while he rapped the door of a knocked-together-by-hand house the color of soot. A soot-colored wife came to answer."

"He felt her cold little lips and her small cold mouth, her little cold hands that felt so greedy. / ‘Daddy, you'll never have to work,’ Kitty Twist told Dove. ‘I'll work hard 'n give you all my money.’ / He couldn't see her smiling too knowingly in the dark. / [...] / ‘Red, what I'm trying to say is I'll hustle for you if want me to.’ / ‘I'll hustle for you too,’ he promised. / ‘My God,’ the girl thought, ‘he thinks I mean I'm going to be a shoe-clerk for him. I'm going to have to straighten him out till there's nothing left but kinks.’"

"Down in Houston's Mexican slum there stood, that June of '31, a three-story firetrap with a name: H O T E L / That's all: Hotel Hotel. / ‘Never did try sleepin' in a skyscraper afore,’ Dove looked up – ‘Whut do it costes here?’ / ‘Thirty-five cents apiece,’ Kitty informed him, ‘and some places go yet higher.’ / ‘In that case,’ Dove decided, ‘we'll have to find an inexpensive place.’ / ‘We get breakfast throwed in here though.’ / ‘What gits throwed?’ / ‘Mission donuts 'n coffee black.’ / ‘Then we're too far north.’ / Kitty tried to let it go but the temptation was too strong. / ‘How do you figure that, Red?’ / ‘When folks stop puttin' out liverpuddin' for breakfast, everyone's too far north.’"

"Three shots of corn likker and the whole stuffed zoo – Moose, Elks, Woodmen, Lions, Thirty-Third Degree Owls and Forty-Fourth Degree Field Mice begin to conspire against the very laws they themselves have written. / It was all right to take a slug of whiskey from your own flask in a taxi, but forbidden on a trolley-car. That didn't help those who rode trolley-cars. You couldn't carry liquor down the street, but if you owned a car you just bypassed that. For every statute they had a little loophole – that by coincidence fitted their own figures as if measured for them. Those who had no hand in writing statutes – panders and madams and such as that – had a harder time squeezing through. / It was an ancestral treachery that all do-righters practice."

"‘Un-utter-uble sorrows is in store for all,’ he gave his holy word – a Santa Claus with nothing save horrors in his sack, hollowing every syllable to make Hell so imminent they could scarcely await their turn on the spit. ‘Un-utter-uble sorrows! Un-dying Damnation! Ut-ray-jus visi-tay-shuns! Invasion by an army! A army of lepers! [...]’ / Oh, they loved those leper mounties so they scarcely knew which side to join first. It didn't matter: no cause was too mad so long as the action was fast and the field bloody. Swept, they were swept by the enormous loneliness of their lives up to the very gates of the golden city, then swept clear back to the burning plains of Damnation. An action so fast it permitted no moment wherein to take breath and look within. To look within at their own hearts, so dark so empty just as hearts. [...] / ‘How about New York?’ some people never wanted to go anywhere alone. / ‘Buried in a rain of toads! Toads big as cats to Wall Street's topmost tower!’ / Wall Street had all the luck."

"YOU ARE NOW ENTERING ARROYO / Pop. 955 / A statistic that didn't include the Mexican woman whose residence was just far enough beyond it to keep her free of local taxes. Whose own way home, eleven months of twelve, was up a flight of careworn stairs to a room guarded only by the Virgin Mary. / Terasina Vidavarri slept within a double ruin. Within the wreck of her own hopes, inside what was left of the Hotel Crockett. The last guest had left and all along the long uncarpeted hall, the doors, like her own soul's door, were boarded on both sides. / [...] / ‘It is lucky to love any time, for then you have someone to live for,’ Terasina thought, ‘but if you are not in love that is lucky also. Because then you have no problem.’"

"A Mexican girl held, in a fold of a yellow shawl, a carnival to her breast. The shawl's dusty fringes, tumbling past her ankles, had gathered enough soot to start a fire itself. Kewpie and child guarded an empty doll buggy on knock-kneed wheels. [...A train comes and goes...] In the ditch at the embankment's foot a doll buggy lay upside down, its wheels still turning this way then that. A few feet away someone had slung a yellow shawl. It stirred. Then its yellow began seeping to black. / ‘The wheel caught the buggy but she wouldn't let go of the handle,’ he heard somebody say. / ‘Wait for the priest,’ said somebody else in such a tone that Dove assumed that the priest, when he came, would explain, in low, simple tones, how a child so small could love a doll so much that she had not feared even a freight train's wheels."

"Her breath began drawing slower, soot and sleep sealed her eyes. / Her face in sleep looked furtive yet innocent, like one already punished for a crime she hasn't grown up to commit. When she was old enough to commit it she'd find it."

"When opening time was closing time and everyone was there, down where you lay your money down, where it's everything but square, where hungry young hustlers hustle dissatisfied old cats and ancient glass-eyed satyrs make passes at bandrats; where it's leaping on the tables, where it's howling lowdown blues, when it's everything to gain and not a thing to lose – when it's all bought and paid for then there's always one thing sure: it's some Do-right Daddy-O running the whole show."

"‘Why, I got a daddy friend don't take a dime off me. He buys me things. He's going to buy me a Cadillac so long I'll have to back up to turn a corner.’ Whatever Fort Worth's real name was, no one ever called her anything but Five, to honor a navel formed to that figure. When asked to show her wonderful navel she would show it, sweetly and simply, just like that. Men pinched her bottom, yet she did not hold herself proudly just because of that. / No chicken farm story was likely to catch Five. She had been brought up on one, and had had enough of that. Yet she was wide open to the Cadillac story, which was nothing more than the chicken farm story on wheels. / Oh, that long easy rider with the real careful driver. When promises would buy Cadillacs, Five would own a whole fleet. / Until that time Five would go on her feet."

"‘More shameful things are worn by women on the open street these days than were worn in brothels a few years ago,’ the old man went on and on. And there was nobody to ask him how did he know what had been worn in brothels a few years ago. / ‘Even our little girls are turned out into the streets almost naked, inviting God's judgement on sin black as Sodom! Are we willing to pay the price?’ he asked, and answered his own question, ‘When it comes to God dealing with a nation's sin, there are no dollar days. Are we willing to pay the price?’ / They stared up at him indifferently. If they had the price of anything they would be in the movie or brothel, that look told."

"[My father] always said that luck was something inside the character of a man. For one qualified for luck, jars of water will turn into silver; for one unqualified, jars of silver will turn into water."

"It seemed to them that their own story was but a moment in old, ageless Peking, a story written by the finger of Time itself."

"Below the temple tens of thousands of men, women, and children were moving across the beautiful country on that glorious New Year morning, shouting and cheering as the army trucks passed. The soldiers' song rose once again:Never to come back Until our hills and rivers are returned to us!Mulan, drawing near them, was seized with a new and strange emotion. A sense of happiness, a sense of glory, she thought it was. She was stirred as she had never been before, as one can be stirred only when losing oneself in a great movement. ... It was not only the soldiers, but this great moving column of which she was a part. She had a sense of her nation such as she had never had so vividly before, of a people united by a common loyalty and, though fleeing from a common enemy, still a people whose patience and strength were like the ten-thousand li Great Wall, and as enduring. She had heard of the flight of whole populations in North and Middle China, and how forty millions of her brothers and sisters from the "same womb" were marching westward in the greatest migration in the world's history, to build a new and modern state in the vast hinterland of China. She felt these forty million people moving in one fundamental rhythm. Amidst the stark privations and sufferings of the refugees, she had not heard one speak against the government for the policy of resistance to Japan. All these people, she saw, preferred war to slavery, like Mannia, even though it was a war that had destroyed their homes, killed their relatives, and left them nothing but the barest personal belongings, their rice bowls and their chopsticks. Such was the triumph of the human spirit. There was no catastrophe so great that the spirit could not rise above it and, out of its very magnitude, transform it into something great and glorious."

"Life and death are the very law of existence. A true Taoist merely triumphs over death. He dies more cheerfully than others. He is not afraid of it, because he is 'returning to the Tao,' as we say..." "So you do not believe in immortality," said Mulan. "I do, my child. I am immortal through you and your sister and Afei and all the children born of my children. I am living all over again in you, as you are living all over again in Atung and Amei. There is no death. You cannot defeat nature. Life goes on forever."

"Do you believe in all the childish things they are advocating?" said Lifu. "They are striking even at ancestor worship. They want to sweep aside everything old. Why, they even denounce 'good mothers and helpful wives' as a degrading ideal hampering the woman's own development as an individual!" "Let them do it," said old Yao. "If they are right, they will do some good, and if they are wrong, they cannot do the Truth (Tao) any harm. As a matter of fact, they are often wrong, as in this individualism. Don't worry. Let them fight it out. When a thing is wrong, they will get tired of it themselves after a while. Have you forgotten Chuangtse? Nobody is right and nobody is wrong. Only one thing is right, and that is the Truth, but nobody knows what it is. It is a thing that changes all the time, and then comes back to the same thing."

"You take this literary revolution, for instance," old Yao continued. "Many people think it is right. Why? Because there is something right in it. Any movement grows only when the time is ripe and it says something which many feel. Many feel that this Old China must be swept aside, or we shall never make any progress. People are wanting to change. You cannot help that, and you cannot stop them. There are excesses, but people cannot say what is wrong and maintain it for long. A falsehood is not argued out of court; it just rubs off, like bad paint, by itself."

"And as the scene changed for Mulan, something inside her also changed. She lost all sense of space and direction, lost even the sense of her personal identity, and felt that she had become one of the great common people. She had so often wished to belong to the common people; now she was indeed one of them. The conquest of the ego which her father had achieved by sheer contemplation, she now achieved through human contact with this great company of men, women, and children. ... In this moving mass of refugees, there was now neither rich nor poor. The war and its depredations had leveled them all."

"Life and death and growth and decay are the very law of nature. Luck and adversity are but the natural consequences of each one's personal character, and there is no avoiding them. So although parting in life or through death is sad according to normal human sentiments, I wish you to take these things and accept them as part of the Way."

"All life was the result of two forces—centrality and eccentricity. Without eccentricity, there would be no progress, and without centrality there would be no stability. Man's life results from the harmonious complementing of these two opposite principles, like the inter-breeding of the yin and yang which produces the four seasons of the year."

"Mulan's father had begun to take a very light view of his wealth. There was no better way of squandering his money than for the wedding of his favorite daughter—to see happiness while it lasted. Wealth was to him like a fireworks display tracing lines of fire in the dark sky—with plenty of splutter and brilliance, and ending in smoke, ashes, and the charred ends on the ground."

"Everything has its destined owner. How many hundred owners do you think those Chou bronzes have had in the last three thousand years? No one ever permanently owns a thing in this world."

"When a family is in poverty it produces a filial son, and when a country is in danger it produces a patriot."

"Better than all medicine is the ability to take things lightly."

""Do you remember," said Lifu, "how the Chin Emperor was afraid of death and sent five hundred virgin boys to the Eastern Sea to seek the Pill of Immortality? And now the rock survives him." "The rock survives because it has no mortal passion," said Mulan enigmatically. Darkness was quickly enveloping them. What had been a sea of golden fleece was now only a sandy gray surface blanketing the earth; and wandering clouds, tired of their day's journey, came into the valleys before them and settled for the night, leaving the higher peaks like little gray islands in the sea of night. So does Nature herself labor by day and rest by night. It was peace with a terror in it. Five minutes ago Mulan's heart was excited. Now she was calm and strangely sad, the outward excitement having descended into rumbling depths in her belly, hardly perceptible by her head. Dragging her tired legs up the steps, she thought of life and death, of the life of passion and the life of the rocks without passion. She realized that this was but a passing moment in the eternity of time, but to her it was a memorable moment—a complete philosophy in itself, or rather a complete vision of the past and the present and the future, of the self and the non-self. That vision, too, was wordless."

"[Mulan] asked [her father], "Why did you say last night that all the curios are trash and rubbish?" "If you consider them trash and rubbish, then they are trash and rubbish," he said."

"The true people of China are rooted in the soil that they love. She stepped into her place among them."

"This novel is neither an apology for contemporary Chinese life nor an expose of it. ... It is neither a glorification of the old way of life nor a defense of the new. It is merely a story of how men and women in the contemporary era grow up and learn to live with one another, how they love and hate and quarrel and forgive and suffer and enjoy, how certain habits of living and ways of thinking are formed, and how, above all, they adjust themselves to the circumstances in this earthly life where men strive but the gods rule."

"When you yourself are right, nothing that happens to you can ever be wrong."

"If any looters come, offer no resistance but ask them to help themselves. Do not risk your old life for these trash and rubbish! They are not worth it."

"Books can also provoke emotions. And emotions sometimes are even more troublesome than ideas. Emotions have led people to do all sorts of things they later regret-like, oh, throwing a book at someone else."

"Generally speaking, books don't cause much harm. Except when you read them, that is. Then they cause all kinds of problems."

"Only bad books have good endings. If a book is any good, it's ending is always bad - because you don't want the book to end."

"Mark Twain has finally fulfilled the earnest hope of many of his best friends, in writing a book which has other and higher merits than can possibly belong to the most artistic expression of mere humor."

"The tale is full of romantic surprises, and besides being rich in historical facts and teachings, is charged with a generous and ennobling moral."